Bucks County Playhouse remembers Tony-winning playwright Christopher Durang of Erwinna

Christopher Durang, the Tony-winning playwright who died earlier this month, was a cultural advance scout.

The frontiers he explored, in outrageous black comedies like "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains it All For You" (1979), "Beyond Therapy" (1981), and "Why Torture is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them" (2009), blazed a trail for others.

Durang, who lived in Erwinna with his husband, playwright John Augustine, died April 2 at age 75 from complications of logopenic progressive aphasia, a condition related to Alzheimer's disease.

In addition to writing, he also acted, including in his Tony-winning triumph “Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike” at Bucks County Playhouse in 2014, a year after it captured Broadway's top prize. He played Vanya opposite Marilu Henner and Deirdre Madigan in the comic Chekhov mashup.

Durang is remembered by the Bucks County Playhouse where he also served as a member of its Artists Board.

“Everyone at Bucks County Playhouse is tremendously saddened by the news of Chris’ passing," said a statement issued by Bucks County Playhouse’s producing director Alexander Fraser, executive producer Robyn Goodman and producer Josh Fiedler.

"While we knew Chris over the years in New York, it wasn’t until we came to New Hope in 2014 that we got to know him and John (Augustine) well," the Playhouse producers said. "Our first season, we asked Chris to play Vanya in his play, 'Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike.' Initially hesitant, we didn’t take no for an answer."

"When I was writing, I did think, 'I haven’t acted in a while and it would be fun to play this part,' " Durang told the Bucks County Courier Times in a 2014 interview. David Hyde Pierce handled the role on Broadway. "One of the triggers to me writing this play was I had always loved Chekhov plays in my 20s and 30s. I was a young man so I didn’t totally identify with the older characters — but I felt empathy for them. Suddenly, I looked at my gray hair and thought, 'I’m the age of Uncle Vanya.' "

"As talented an actor as he was a playwright, he was terrific in the part and quickly became an ardent supporter and joined our board in 2015," the Playhouse statement continued. "John became an artistic associate shortly thereafter, and together they became beloved members of our family. We send our love to John and to Chris’ large community in celebrating his legacy.”

"People talk about difficult actors all the time," Durang said in the 2014 interview. "I just haven't experienced it. Most of the time, I've worked with really pleasant, happy people... Maybe it's my aura."

Durang seemed to enjoy hobnobbing, virtually, with the directors of local productions. Michael Bias, who staged Durang's 1987 play "Laughing Wild" at his Garage Theater in Teaneck, N.J., in 2005, also interacted with the playwright during the course of the run.

"He was a nice guy," said Bias, a writer, director and producer. "He had this wonderful skewed vision of the world, which I think pops up in all his plays. He looked at the world and turned it inside out and upside down."

Bucks County has part in Tony-winner's set design

Durang, a Montclair, N.J., native, first staged "Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike" in his home state at the McCarter Theater in Princeton. But he brought a little bit of Bucks County to the production as the play's set design was inspired by Durang's own Erwinna farmhouse.

Theater of the absurd, as well as theater of cruelty, were both strong elements in his work. Durang didn't hesitate to mock those who stigmatize others while rationalizing their own prejudices as religion or psychiatry.

That made him edgy. Too edgy, for some audiences.

"In 'Laughing Wild,' there is a scene where I was playing God, talking to one of my angels," Bias recalled. "[Gabriel] asks, 'Why did you give the world AIDS?' 'Well, because the world's a very bad place.' 'But children...?' 'Well, you gotta start somewhere.'

"I will never forget that when I was doing that particular scene one night, a woman walked out of the theater. The next day I got a three-page letter saying that she would never go to another Garage production. She was so offended we would do something like this. I framed it and had it over my desk. It was like wow, we really hit a nerve."

Durang wrote over 20 plays and musicals, taught at Yale — his alma mater — and Juilliard, collaborated with friends Wendy Wasserstein and Sigourney Weaver (a fellow Yale alum), and received numerous honors, including an Obie Award and an induction into the American Theater Hall of Fame. Several of his plays, including "Beyond Therapy," were made into films or TV movies.

But one of his underappreciated legacies may be what he enabled other playwrights to do. But for him, there might be no "Book of Mormon" on Broadway. Durang paved the way.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Bucks County's Christopher Durang, Tony-winning playwright, dies at 75